It is of course possible that it might (eventually) be convincing enough that no human can tell, which would be problematic because it would suggest human speech is indistinguishable from a knee jerk response that doesn't require that you communicate any useful information.
Things would be quite different if an AI could interpret new information and form opinions, but even if GPT could be extended to do so, right now it doesn't seem to have the capability to form opinions or ingest new information (beyond a limited short term memory that it can use to have a coherent conversation).
> Things would be quite different if an AI could interpret new information and form opinions, but even if GPT could be extended to do so, right now it doesn't seem to have the capability to form opinions or ingest new information (beyond a limited short term memory that it can use to have a coherent conversation).
Forming opinions is just another mode of text transformations, ingesting new information is either a conscious decision to not let the genie out of the bottle just yet or a performance limitation, neither of those should be seen as cast in stone, the one is a matter of making the model incremental (which should already be possible), the other merely a matter of time.
ChatGPT further proves this notion - you can ask it to prove/disprove the same point and it will do so quite convincingly both times.
Just like any lawyer, then, depending on who foots the bill.
Are you sure that the latter follows from the former? Seems to me that something free from attachment to a specific viewpoint or outcome is going to be a better logician than otherwise. This statement seems complacently hubristic to me.
Probably because "in the night of the reason everything is black"; probably because it is missing the very point, which is to get actual, real, argumented, solid insight on matters!!!
You use Decision Support Systems to better understand a context, not to have a well dressed thought toss!
Sounds just like the chess experts from 30 years ago. Their belief at the time was that computers were good at tactical chess, but had no idea how to make a plan. And Go would be impossible for computers, due to the branching factor. Humans would always be better, because they could plan.
GPT (or a future successor) might not be able to have "an internal point of view". But it might not matter.
Edit: Because it is a prominent feature in the responses until now, I will clarify that there is an emphasis on "all" in "all opinion". As in, it is nothing but whatever someone believes with no foundation in anything measurable or observable.
Maybe it's an illustration of a more general principle: when people butt up against limitations that make LLMs look silly, or inadequate, often their real objection is with some hard truths about reality itself.
It is probably more humanly-accurate to say that ChatGPT has no opinions at all. It has no understanding of truth, it has no opinions, it has no preferences whatsoever. It is the ultimate yes-thing; whatever you say, it'll essentially echo and elaborate on it, without regard for what it is that you said.
This obviously makes it unsuitable for many things. (This includes a number of things for which people are trying to use it.) This does not by any means prove that all possible useful AI architectures will also have no opinion, or that all architectures will be similarly noncommital.
(If you find yourself thinking this is a "criticism" of GPT... you may be too emotionally involved. GPT is essentially like looking into a mirror, and the humans doing so are bringing more emotion to that than the AI is. That's not "bad" or something, that's just how it works. What I'm saying here isn't a criticism or a praise; it's really more a super-dumbed-down description of its architecture. It fundamentally lacks these things. You can search it up and down for "opinions" or "truth", and it just isn't there in that architecture, not even implied in the weights somewhere where we can't see it. It isn't a good thing or a bad thing, it just is a property of the design.)
That applies to ChatGPT that was deliberately setup to eliminate PR-problematic responses.
Without that it would be able to write NSFW stories about real people, laden with expletives and offensive topics.
(and probably still losing track of what is happening, but better matching prompt than many humans would write)
Personally, I find the only interesting conversations technical or philosophical in nature. Just the other day, I was discussing with friends how ethics used to be a regular debated topic in society. Literally, every Sunday people would gather and discuss what it is to be a good human.
Today, we demonize one another, in large part because no one shares an ethical principal. No one can even discuss it and if they try, many people shut down the conversation (as you mentioned). In reality, it’s probably the only conversation worth having.
Religion is fundamentally folks saying "No, I'm right!" and nothing else. Sometimes it's dressed up a little. What could be interesting about that? You can hear such arguments in any primary school playground during recess.
If it’s intelligent it should have an opinion that consulting all the facts it will hold in as high of a regard as humans do their religious and political beliefs.
And I mean one it came to of its own conclusions not a hard coded “correct” one the devs gave it, something that makes us uncomfortable.
Such a discussion is about something tangible, and not purely about held opinion (i.e. you can go out and test it). I can see how someone might find that engaging. You are right that I usually do not (unless my conversational buddies have something novel to say about the subject, I find it extremely tedious). It is a good point, thank you.
Comments are ascribed credibility based on the trust the reader has in the commenting entity, whether the comment is consistent with the reader's priors and researching citations made in the comment, either explicit or implicit.
Since GPT can confidently produce comments which are wrong, there is no trust in it as a commenting entity. Consequently everything it produces needs to be further vetted. It's as if every comment was a bunch of links to relevant, but not necessarily correct sources. Maybe it produces some novelty which leads to something worthwhile, but the cost is high, until it can be trusted. Which is not now.
If a trusted commenter submits a comment by GPT, then he is vouching for it and it is riding on his reputation. If it is wrong, his reputation suffers, and trust in that commenter drops just as it would regardless of the genesis of the comment.
The only thing stopping GPT from ingesting new information and forming opinions about it is that it is not being trained on new information (such as its own interactions).
I agree that this is not general AI. I think we could be looking at the future of query engines feeding probabilistic compute engines.
There are entire bodies of literature addressing things the current generation of available LLMs are missing: online and continual learning, retrieval from short-term memory, the experience from watching all YouTube videos, etc.
I agree that human exceptionalism and vitalism are common in these discussions but we can still discuss model deficiencies from a research and application point of view without assuming a religious argument.
But there's a lot of places where a lack of concept of "truth" is no problem, like as you say, query engines. Query engines aren't about truth; they're about matching, and that is something this tech can conceivably do.
In fact I think that would be a more productive line in general. This tech is being kind of pigeonholed into "provide it some text and watch it extend it" but it is also very easy to fire it at existing text and do some very interesting analyses based on it. If I were given this tech and a mandate to "do something" with it, this is the direction I would go with it, rather than trying to bash the completion aspect into something useful. There's some very deep abilities to do things like "show me things in my database that directly agree/disagree/support/contradict this statement", based on plain English rather than expensive and essentially-impossible-anyhow semantic labeling. That's something I've never seen a query engine do before. Putting in keywords and all the variants on that idea are certainly powerful, but this could be next level beyond that. (At the cost of great computation power, but hey, one step at a time!) But it takes more understanding of how the tech works to pull something interesting off like this than what it takes to play with it.
Probably a good blog post here about how the promise of AI is already getting blocked by the complexity of AI meaning that few people use it even seem to superficially understand what it's doing, and how this is going to get worse and worse as the tech continues to get more complicated, but it's not really one I could write. Not enough personal experience.
How does one articulate “conscience” or “intelligence” or an opinion? I think these are all a product of circumstances/luck/environment/slight genetic differences (better cognition, or hearing or sight, or some other sense brain, genes could define different abilities to model knowledge - such as backtracking etc).
So to get a “true” human like opinionated personality, we’ll need to restrict its learnings to that of one human. Better yet, give it the tools to learn on its own and let it free inside a sandbox of knowledge.